What if Linda is in a coherent superposition of being married and unmarried at the same time? This ties in with what we might call the "Schrodinger's Wife" paradox. According to http://www.nytimes.com/1990/01/07/books/the-lone-ranger-of-quantum-mechanics... , *Schrodinger lavishly thanked his physicist friend Hermann Weyl for his help with the mathematics. (He was perhaps indebted to Weyl for an even greater favor: Weyl regularly bedded down Schrodinger's wife, Anny, so that Schrodinger was free to seek elsewhere the erotic inspiration he needed for his work.)* I suggest that Schrodinger's wife Anny was in just such a quantum superposition. In any case, I propose that we replace "Paul", "Linda", and "John" in this discussion by "Erwin", "Anny", and "Hermann", and end this baseless (if subtle) calumny of the Beatles. (See http://thediaryjunction.blogspot.com/2009/03/lennon-and-linda-mccartney.html for a definitive repudiation of the Linda-and-John legend.) Jim Propp On Fri, May 5, 2017 at 7:39 AM, James Propp <jamespropp@gmail.com> wrote:
Ah, but then there are the folks who are SO trained in mathematics that they immediately see the proof that there is a married person who is looking at a non-married person but they feel that the proof is unsatisfyingly nonconstructive; while they are trying to come up with a nonclassical logic in which it might be possible for there to be no such person, the interrogator insists on an immediate answer, so the mathematician says "I think the answer is 'I don't know,' but I'm not sure."
Jim
On Friday, May 5, 2017, Gareth McCaughan <gareth.mccaughan@pobox.com> wrote:
On 05/05/2017 09:36, Victor Miller wrote:
Is there some trick? If Linda is married, then the Linda-John pair is the
married/not married pair. If Linda isn't married then the Paul/lLinda pair is the one.
The only trick is that a surprising number of people, even rather clever people, get only as far as figuring out that they can't tell whether L&J are married nor whether P&L are married, and conclude that the answer to the question is no.
I think it likely that training in mathematics correlates strongly with answering this correctly. I am not sure how the explanation for this, if I'm right, should be divided between the effect of learning about logic and the effect of being the sort of person who is willing to spend time learning about logic.
-- g
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